Ontology-Based Modelling of Session Management Policies for Groupware Applications

Groupware applications support group work and groups may perform geographically distributed with different roles and using different organizational structures. It is important that these applications do not provide only the needed infrastructure to support group work, but also grant some ways to change the group behaviour during a session. Therefore, this paper presents a conceptual model of the session management policies by means of an ontology, i.e. we model the form in which group work is organized. This ontology describes the concepts, the relations among them and the axioms that allow to specify and control the role changes that a user can play in a session and the changes in the rights/obligations of each role. In this model we have separated the mechanisms that consent to establishing a session (i.e. mechanisms to create the shared workspace) from the session management policies. Moreover, we can create templates of policies that can be employed to facilitate their reuse in runtime. In this way, we can affirm that this model smooths the dynamic group work.

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